School

 of  Compu,ng  Science  

Why I do CS Research
25 April 2014
Wim Vanderbauwhede
I want to talk
about
fiction
(and CS).
Iain Banks,
Scottish writer,
died last year.
 He created
“the Culture”.
In the Culture,
 sentient machines
run everything,
everyone has everything
and everything is free.
 Banks envisaged that
the society of the Culture
came about through
the sheer availability
of information and
computing power.
In other words,
in Banks’s
vision,
 CS
created
Utopia.
Back in the
present …
CS luckily still has
some unsolved
questions ...
of some problems for
your specialism
•  In my area, e.g. exploiting
parallelism and heterogeneous systems
for energy-efficient computing.
•  So we need new languages,
compilers, architectures, etc.
 Back in the
real world …
there are many
problems:
•  climate change
•  aging population
•  energy security
•  the internet is broken
•  climate change
•  aging population
•  energy security
•  the internet is broken
I want to think of ways
of using my research
to help address some
of those problems.
•  e.g. helping weather scientists to
improve prediction of severe weather
events.
•  or linking rainfall predictions to
flooding simulations
That way, I feel
I’m part of the
solution.
Thank you!